Gone

where he lay. Two kids, a boy and a girl, were silhouetted by the glare. Neither of them was Drake Merwin.
    Jack dared to breathe. He didn’t dare stand up.
    “We saw you driving around out here with your lights off,” the girl said accusingly.
    Jack wondered how she could have seen him on a pitch-black night. He didn’t ask, but she provided the answer, anyway.
    “Even if you have your headlights off, your brake lights still come on. I guess you didn’t think of that.”
    “I’m not very experienced at driving,” Jack said.
    “Who are you?” the boy, who looked to be Jack’s age, asked.
    “Me? I’m…Jack. People call me Computer Jack.”
    The girl had a shotgun in her hands. She aimed the barrel at Jack’s face.
    “Don’t shoot me,” he begged.
    “You’re on our land, and we protect our land,” the girl said. “Why shouldn’t we shoot you?”
    “I have to…if I don’t…Listen, if I don’t get to Perdido Beach, something awful is going to happen.”
    The girl had an odd combination of pigtails and a hard face made even harder by the harsh white light from the SUV. She seemed unimpressed. She was maybe eleven or twelve and it occurred to Jack that there was so much resemblance that the boy had to be her brother.
    The boy said, “He doesn’t look dangerous.” To Jack, he said, “How come they call you Computer Jack?”
    “Because I know a lot about computers.”
    The boy thought awhile and said, “Can you fix a Wii?”
    Jack nodded violently, digging dirt into his hair. “I could try. But really, really, I have to get to Perdido Beach. It’s really important.”
    “Well, my Wii is important to me. So if you fix my Wii, I won’t let Emily shoot you. I guess not getting shot would be as important as you getting to Perdido Beach, huh?”

    “Hi, Mary,” Quinn said. She met him at the door of the day care classroom. “I’m heading up top.”
    Mary closed the door quickly behind her. “I don’t want the kids to see the guns,” she said. She herself was staring at the weapon.
    “Mary, I don’t want to see it my own self,” Quinn said.
    “Are you scared?”
    “Pee-less.”
    “Me too.” She touched Quinn’s arm. “God bless you.”
    “Yeah. Let’s hope so, huh?” He wanted to stay and talk to her. Anything to avoid climbing up on the roof with a machine gun. But Mary had her duty, and he had his. He was ashamed to realize that he yearned to go into that day care room and just hide in there with Mary.
    He went through the day care to the alleyway in back. He slung the machine pistol carefully and climbed the rickety aluminum ladder.
    The day care and the hardware shared a roof. It was flat, gravel and tar, adorned only by several vertical pipes and two ancient air-conditioning units. The roof was encircled by a parapet, a three-foot-high wall topped with cracked Spanish tile.
    Quinn went to the corner facing the church and town hall. He watched as Sam and Dekka marched off.
    “Don’t screw up today,” Quinn told himself. “Just don’t screw up.”
    The ladder rattled, and something blurred over onto the roof. Quinn swung his gun around. The blur resolved itself into the figure of Brianna.
    “You have got to stop doing that, Brianna,” Quinn said.
    Brianna smiled and said, “The Breeze. My name is the Breeze.”
    “You are way too into this,” Quinn grumbled. “I mean, what are you, ten?”
    “I’m eleven. I’ll be twelve in a month.” Brianna pulled a claw hammer from her belt and brandished it. “Caine and Drake had me starving to death with a cinder block on each hand. I wasn’ttoo young for Caine and Drake to almost kill me.”
    “Yeah.” Quinn wished she would go away and leave him in peace, but it was her assignment to move between Quinn and Edilio and Sam and anyone else, carrying messages. “So. How fast can you go, Brianna?”
    “I don’t know. Fast enough that people almost can’t see me.”
    “Doesn’t it kind of wear you out?”
    “Not really. But it kind of tears up my shoes.” She raised one foot to show him a worn sole on her sneakers. “And I have to keep my hair in pigtails or it whips around and stings my eyes.” She gave her braided pigtails a toss.
    “Must be weird. Having powers.”
    “You don’t have any?”
    He shook his head. “No. Nothing. I’m just…me.”
    “You know Sam real well, right?”
    He nodded. It was a question he got a lot from Coates kids.
    “Do you think he’ll win?” she asked.
    “Guess we